Undermining the dignity of the poor is a tendency that "resides deep in the pores of our culture", observes Robert Walker, professor of social policy at Oxford University, who has just embarked on a major international study on the connection between shame and poverty.

He goes on to quote Indian economist Amartya Sen, who argues that "shame is pernicious because it leads to a lack of self-esteem, and ultimately that saps the will to get on and do something. You retreat into yourself and let go of people around you who could help".

"[In the UK] the Victorian legacy pervades public discourse," Walker maintains. "We still talk about the deserving and the undeserving poor, and about 'handouts'. As for 'scroungers', I sense that it's increasingly being used as a collective term for claimants of working age."

Walker believes that we need to develop a language recognising that the vast majority of people who are poor are little different from anyone else, apart from the obvious lack of money. "They are not 'the other'. They are simply people whose lives have gone haywire. Maybe that's a consequence of a deprived background or illness or accident. But they are citizens, like us. Over a 10-year period, more than half of all UK households experience poverty for a year or so," he says.

"[There] is the possibility that the repeated use of the language of dependency unfairly stigmatises ordinary benefit recipients and undermines self-esteem."

His research project, which will report in more than two years, will be looking at eight countries as diverse as Norway and Uganda, Germany and China, as well as South Korea, India and Pakistan. The researchers will not only be asking poor people about their experiences but also trying to assess wider social attitudes towards poverty. "To do that," he says, "we have to understand the dominant values of each country. We're in the process of building a corpus of literature and film to help inform us."

Suggested UK films include Shane Meadows' This is England, Billy Elliott and The Full Monty. Books range from Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to Irving Welsh's Trainspotting. They will be analysed to elicit social mores and to identify examples of when, if at all, shame is associated with poverty.

Asked about what he thinks of the portrayal of the benefit claimants in Channel 4's television series Shameless, Walker replies: "The question is whether it's an accurate reflection of real life."

It is tempting to visualise the yawning gap between the real-life equivalents of the fictional Chatsworth Estate, where Shameless is set, and Green Templeton College, Oxford, where Walker works. To portray him as a well-meaning academic in the proverbial ivory tower, however, would be misleading. He was brought up in Birmingham, the son of a factory worker who educated himself during the second world war and became a teacher in inner-city schools. "I was brought up with an awareness of the problems that he worked with," says Walker, 61, who armed with a doctorate in social geography took a job in the civil service looking into why so many people were failing to claim the rent allowance (now called housing benefit) they were entitled to.

What struck him, even in the mid 1970s, was the effort that mothers, in particular, made to try to protect their children from feeling shame – to the extent that they would skip meals to buy clothes and toys for them. "Children as young as seven and eight soon learn strategies to persuade parents to buy them what they think they need," says Walker.

That process accelerated during the 1980s, he points out. "People at the bottom are influenced by what they see in the media as much as anybody else. And expectations were rising at a time when inequalities increased substantially and child poverty tripled. We've never got on top of that, despite 13 years of New Labour," he says.

Walker is now a member of the Department for Work and Pensions' social security advisory committee, which will respond to proposals to overhaul the benefits system by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Walker himself contests Duncan Smith's perception that there is a widespread culture of worklessness and dependency as a consequence of the benefits system.

If his ambitious study is able to demonstrate that shame and poverty are intimately connected in all cultures, he says he hopes the findings will help shape global anti-poverty policies based on promoting human dignity.